The idea that meaning is not shared across cultural contexts is a very postmodern idea posited by men like Jacques Derrida and it is an wonderful example of philosophy taken to the most absurd places.
I was introduced to postmodernism by my children, who had to study it in their philosophy classes. It has its good points and its bad points---like most philosophies. And it does get carried to extremes---like most philosophies.
Of course, it is possible to share meaning across cultural contexts, but you have to work at it. You have to recognize that culture shapes meaning and different cultures shape meanings in different ways. You can't begin by assuming that the culture that is normal for you is normal for everybody.
But once the existence of differences is recognized, then one can explore the variations in meaning and make oneself clear across cultural differences.
Modernism also recognizes that we interpret what God said to a people of a different time and culture through the filters of our own time and culture; the difference is that modernism seeks to remove those filters to the degree that it is possible but postmodernism posits that it is impossible to remove those filters with any degree of certainty at all. For the postmodern knowledge is an all or nothing proposition. We all agree that no one can know everything but the postmodern makes the illogical conclusion that nothing can be known with any degree of certainty at all.
Since every culture, including the biblical culture and our own culture and Inuit and Swahili and Mandarin cultures all have filters of some kind, how is it possible to remove all filters?
One can learn to express oneself in a different language, using its embedded filters. But that is simply exchanging one set of filters for another.
The initial arguments of this thread began as modernist arguments i.e. seeking to understand the text as the author intended but has quickly taken a postmodern turn. A postmodern doesn't seek to understand authorial intent because he believes authorial intent is irrelevant; the post modern seeks to interpret the text through the lens of his own culture believing that is all that is possible.
I don't know that that is true. If it is, then it is a weak point of postmodernism. All hermeneutics aims to interpret the text in terms of the culture of the current audience. But that doesn't make the intent of the author irrelevant. After all, the intent of the author is what one is supposedly interpreting, so understanding what the author intended is essential background to interpreting it.
What postmodernism would recognize is that the author is also expressing him/herself in terms of unrecognized cultural assumptions and filters that have their own blind spots, just as ours do.
An obvious example is the paucity of references to women in scripture. The feeding of the five thousand, for example, actually specifies five thousand men and merely mentions the presence of women and children without counting them.
So a thorough-going hermeneutics must look at that aspect of the author's composition as well. What assumptions is the author making that are alien to us?
I agree that the discussion began from a modernist perspective but here is the statement I saw that appears to reflect a turn towards postmodernism i.e. "What we call "natural" is very much culturally conditioned and so varies from culture to culture." Linguists coming from a modernist perspective recognize that, while the differences in one cultural context can pose significant obstacles for understanding langauge of those in other contexts, there are some universal concepts that cross all cultural boundaries and provide a common framework for one context to understand the words of a differing context. The postmodern rejects the idea of any universal concepts and sees the obstacles to understanding as insurmountable.
Now I know you are a bit off-base on postmodernism.
The post-modernist does not reject the idea of universal concepts which refer to universal human experiences. It is evident, for example, that we all have experiences like love, fear, hunger, pain, joy, etc. and all languages express these concepts in some way--so they are translatable and transferable from one context to another.
What the post-modernist rejects is imposing any one set of cultural assumptions
as universal when it is not. In particular, post-modernism rejects the modernist assumption that modernism expresses universal truth. It identifies the modernist impulse as one culture-bound perspective (that of the autonomous, middle-class, white European male) among many, but which arrogates to itself the idea that it is
the universal truth when it is not. It is actually a fairly narrow vision of truth, for it neglects the perspectives of many other groups of people, suppressing or denying or devaluing them.
Is there any one human cultural vision which is universal? The post-modernist would say no. Every cultural vision, past, present and likely future has its limits, its unrecognized assumptions, its blind spots.
Therefore, we must learn two things:
a) discover the unrecognized assumptions of our own culture and re-examine them
b) learn about other peoples, past and present, and how they think/thought both in order to understand them, and to better understand ourselves.
As any linguist will tell you, learning a second (and third and fourth) language opens a new window on one's own first language. One can speak English only all one's life and never have to understand what a subjunctive is or clearly discriminate between a nominative and accusative noun. But as soon as one aims to express oneself in French or Russian these things become important. And beyond European languages, the different ways of ordering thought are even wider.
Nevertheless, there is indeed enough commonality in human experience that we can learn other languages, understand and be understood in them.
But it takes work.
Post-modernism is basically the same idea applied to whole cultures and world-views, not just language. Just as there is no one universal or natural language--nor any language that is superior to others---so there is no one universal culture with all the right assumptions and no blind spots.
So we have to learn to listen carefully to people modernism tends not to listen to: women, non-literate peoples, people of different faiths, people of different ethnic groups, working people, people of differing abilities, and so on and so forth. All have something of value to tell us.
And we need to humbly recognize our own limitations and present our views, not as universal truths, but as what we discern from our experience as male/female, English/Gujarati/Yoruba speaker, athletic/quadraplegic--etc.
Through a give-and-take that recognizes both the values and the limitations of all particular cultures, we may indeed discover lots of human commonalities--something that genuinely approaches universal truths.
But it takes work.
Meaning can be shared. It cannot be assumed. In particular, it cannot be assumed that a word used in a different language, place, time and culture means what a 21st century American child thinks it means because of his/her exposure to what the current meaning of the word is. That would be the "plain meaning" to that child today. It doesn't make it the "plain meaning" the author intended or his/her target audience understood.
So, we have to work at learning what terms like 'raqia' and 'shamayim' actually meant when the text was written.
